The Mother Fault

by Kate Mildenhall

  She breathes heavily. ‘I don’t know why I thought it would be any different, coming here.’

  Her mother comes in, carrying the tea.

  ‘I’ve got to put the kids to bed. I’ll have it at the unit, Mum.’ Mim pushes her chair in, picks up the empty glasses.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Steve, ‘I don’t know why you thought it would be any different either.’

  * * *

  In the spare bedroom in the unit, she squishes into the double bed with her children.

  ‘Shh, shh,’ she croons and runs her hand over Sam’s head, smooths his hair, his cheeks, so soft still. She lets her fingers brush his arm to his wrist, the tiny raised pimples at the back of his little bicep, the elastic skin of his elbow, forearm grazed with scratches, the almost imperceptible lump of the implant in the flesh between his thumb and forefinger.

  She imagines the invisible rings of radar rippling out from her children’s chips, her own. Who is watching?

  Surely no one, not even the Department, could begrudge her this time at home while she is under such stress? She is prioritising caring for her children, she is going back to the workforce, she is keeping it all together. Surely, surely, she is doing everything right, everything they ever asked of her?

  Maybe it’s what Ben has done?

  Once, one of the engineers ended up in an Indo prison for six months on some trumped-up charge because he was carrying an unverified drone. Not even the Department could get him out. Ben had laughed darkly about it.

  ‘Don’t know what’s worse,’ he’d said, ‘Indo prison or being in trouble with the Department.’

  ‘Don’t even joke about it,’ she’d said, but she’d laughed too. ‘Either option is fucked.’

  The first disappearances had been a shock, but were quickly and deftly rationalised. The Department could only now reveal that the extremists who had been detained had myriad links to international crime syndicates that were threatening our very way of life. The few remaining independent media outlets stopped reporting on them after a while.

  Then came the app. Dob in Disunity. A gamified security hotline with rewards. Even kids could join in the fun! The dropdown lists of reasons for notification grew longer with every update.

  It is simple to read a series of events in rock. Even a child, the most amateur and curious geologist, can look at a highway cut or the beachside cliff and point out the strata, each layer of history. They may not know what happened there but they can read the cumulative effect – this is how we got to where we are.

  And so it was that when Mim first saw a protester outside one of the banks tasered and pulled into the back of a BestLife van, she didn’t blink.

  Nor did she when it became normal to see reports of CEOs dragged from their offices into the ubiquitous vans, corporate espionage stamped all over the reports.

  Once, her hand even hovered over the send button in the app after Essie had come home from school with a new coding toy from Michelle’s dad, who had brought them back from China for the whole class. She drank a bottle of wine that night, crushed the toy under her shoe and got the whole way through filling out the details in the app before she threw the device across the room.

  They’d got the engineer out of Indo in the end. It had been a close thing, but as terrifying as they were, the Department could also ride in on their diplomatic white horse and bring home your loved ones. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

  * * *

  Sleep doesn’t come. She waits. She thinks of Ben. Imagines it is his breathing she can hear on the other side of the bed, that if she stretched out her arm she might touch him. She mouths his name in the dark, imagining his grunted reply, the way he might wrap his arm over her, letting it fit where it always does, under her breast, fingers tucked in around her ribs. She puts her own hand around herself to keep the fear away.

  6

  In the morning, she leaves the kids checking on the cows with Steve and walks out through the gate of the house paddock and across to the dam. The form of the land is recognisable, the dam that was dug over one hundred years back and has been full and dry and full again, this time though with recycled water through the north–south pipeline. The shift from livestock to high yield grain had started decades back. The farmers used to be seen as backwards rednecks by the educated city folk, but they had to start paying attention when most of their politics began to align. So many of the neighbours sold up. Whole regions did. It was a line on the map that saved them. That and luck. Their zone was the third option for the route of the pipeline, but a very lucky sighting of a lizard everyone had thought was already extinct in the zone of option one, and the bankruptcy of the Indian firm behind option two meant they were the region that ended up with the water.

  She used to wonder if the alterations to the GM sorghum crop were visible to the naked eye. Whether there might be a strangeness to the way it moved in the wind, an unreal quality to the colour or the bulk of the heads of grain. But if there was, she’d never noticed it.

  She squats in the clay at the dam’s edge. She remembers being there with Ben when she was pregnant with Sam, five-year-old Essie being doted on by her grandmother back at the house. Ben had sat behind her, his fingers laced around her belly, round but not yet huge. It had felt okay to voice her fears across such an expanse of land and water. She had spoken, low and tremulous, and Ben had waited through it all, even though he had heard those fears many times before. What if it happens again? What if this is a mistake? How will I cope?

  ‘If it happens again, we will cope,’ he had said. ‘Together. We will get through it together.’

  She had rested her hands on his, knowing that his words were only platitudes. He had not seen inside her head. Had not been there on the days she stared blankly at Essie, the plump baby, then the toddler, then the running, jumping pre-schooler, and thought, Who are you? Where did you come from? What have you done to me?

  A gust of wind scurries across the surface of the water. She’d spent whole afternoons here with Steve and Michael, floating on the inner tubes all hot black sticky in the sun, the itch of the mud, shin-deep in some places, where the cattle had worked it all over on the edges. Frisbeeing cow pats into the middle, seeing how far they could get them, how long they’d float before they sank below the surface. It hadn’t all been a shitstorm.

  Around to her right, slinking out of the thatch of scraggly acacia, is the creek, still feeding the dam from the spring further up in the scrub. She doesn’t want to think about the trace elements she’d find in there if she brought her test kit up. The wells they didn’t stop. The leaching toxins entombed in the shale beneath her.

  The three of them had skipped stones here. She was never as good, never as strong. Steve told her she never would be. Michael waited until their brother was gone then told her, ‘You keep practising, you’ll make that arm strong.’ Funny, she hasn’t remembered that for a long time.

  The water garden. She smiles. She’d followed a damp gully down from the creek and found a spot where a slab of granite made a shelf, moss and algae dripping below it. It had been her secret place. Brimming with pride, she’d eventually shown Michael. He was tender with it. Serious. Complimented her fine work. But Steve must have followed them, pissed off he’d been excluded, not that he’d ever let that show. The next weekend she arrived to find the stream dammed with a careful rock wall, her water garden dry. She’d yelled, kicked at it. Furious. She’d pushed her body up against it but Steve had piled it high with heavy rocks, had worked carefully, she could see, to make it sturdy. Impassable. His pool.

  Michael had comforted her.

  ‘Take it apart,’ he’d said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can. One at a time, just dismantle it.’

  It took a week. Michael did not help her, already caught up in his next thing, but every morning she went, knuckles grazed, shins bruised, lower back aching with the strain of it. Rock by rock, until it flowed again. The moss was dead, there w
as a slime-filled puddle beneath the slab, but in time, she knew, it would come back. It would never be the same, but it would run again.

  She rubs her eyes. There is no time for this.

  She pulls her phone from her pocket.

  ‘Please call Ben,’ she asks, knowing already the response she will hear.

  The reception is still dodgy out here, despite all the promises, but there is enough for OMNI to tell her that her husband is uncontactable and ask her if she’d like to record a message.

  She does not. She wants him here. Here. Where she can see him and hold him and ask him to fix the fucking mess he’s made.

  ‘Where the fuck are you?’ Exploding out of her, loud and hoarse and ragged. A trio of ducks takes off, webbed feet paddling frantically across the surface of the dam. She drops to squat on the bank, hangs her head, picks at the small rocks in the mud.

  Maybe she should call the Department. Apologise for taking off. Explain it away – the anxiety, the need for support. Ask if she can stay here until they’ve located Ben. She’ll go see Heidi, start the work, keep the kids distracted from Ben’s absence a little longer.

  She stands, pulls her arm back and throws the rock into the dam, watches the concentric circles birthing from the place where it fell.

  * * *

  Essie is doing drills with her ball, forcing Sam to play with her. He knows the power he has, is making trades.

  ‘Sure, I’ll play for ten minutes but then you have to play Ninja Boy versus the World with me.’

  ‘Sure,’ Essie lies easily. ‘Line up, goalie.’

  Mim shakes her head at Sam’s gullibility. He must figure it’s worth taking a punt every time.

  Behind the house paddock is the eucalypt-rimmed pasture. The smell is grass rot and fertiliser and, from somewhere up the road, the pungent smoke of one of the neighbours burning off. It is achingly familiar. If she were to attempt to create the chemical equation for this smell, she would have no hope of getting it right; it is so singular. It must come down to its parts.

  She sips her tea. It is comforting to be made a cup of tea by her mother. She wonders, not for the first time, if things might have been different if she had chosen to live closer. Had come home to have the baby. What it might have been like in those early milk-shit-sour-sleepless days if she could have handed the baby to her mother. Mum had come down for a few days. But even after the caesarean, Dad reckoned he couldn’t spare her for longer. That was the first round of the cancer and, of course, he was right – she couldn’t ask, she didn’t deserve the help. Millions and millions of women had done it before her. It would get easier.

  Except it never did.

  ‘I thought I might go into town and see Heidi. Get more details about this sampling work she needs me to oversee.’

  ‘Good, good, yes. Leave the kids here.’

  ‘You sure? I can take them.’

  Her mother rolls her eyes and tsks. ‘I’m their grandmother, for goodness sake.’

  ‘And again!’ Essie is waggling two index fingers in the air, running a loop around Sam who is shaking his head.

  ‘Nine minutes and forty-nine seconds, Essie,’ he says, checking his watch, ‘nearly time for my game.’

  Essie laughs, lines up again.

  ‘Whatever, little bro,’ she says, and kicks.

  ‘She’s very aggressive, isn’t she?’ Her mother holds a saucer underneath her teacup.

  ‘She’s trying out for state squad. She’s really good, Mum.’

  ‘I’m sure she is.’

  Don’t bite, Mim thinks.

  ‘Your father would have loved to see them like this. He wouldn’t have believed how big they’ve got. He would’ve said: “Grow ’em back down already”.’

  Mim sees the quiver in her mother’s face. It is all still there, subterranean. She never has the right words.

  ‘Wouldn’t have taken much,’ her mother says.

  Mim presses her lips together, but her mother keeps going.

  ‘To get up here more often.’

  ‘Mum.’ It’s a warning tone. She cannot do this now. Doesn’t have enough space in her head to try to unpick and then stitch back together these hurts, these gaps, all the broken things.

  There’s a ruckus building in one of the big gums just beyond the fence, hundreds of cockies flying in to land, big-winged and white in the canopy of the tree. The noise of it. She can feel the pressure thumping in her head.

  ‘They’ll be coming in for a feed. You watch, your brother’ll get the rifle out in a minute.’

  Mim is glad for the sideways shift. The pressure subsides.

  ‘They that much trouble?’

  ‘Well, your dad didn’t think so.’ Her mother sets down the teacup definitively. ‘But then Steve’s not his father.’

  ‘No. He’s not.’

  Essie has finally given in and both of the kids are scaling the fence, balancing on the top, Sam directing procedures for his game.

  ‘Is it going okay, Mum? With Steve and Jill?’

  She looks over at her mother, who has one hand up to shield her eyes, her rings catching the sun.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  Mim thinks she could say it now. Both of them looking out over the paddocks. She could say, Mum, I’m in trouble. She could say, I don’t know what to do.

  ‘I might head off then, to see Heidi, if you’re sure it’s okay.’

  ‘Off you go,’ her mother says.

  * * *

  When she gets out to open the front paddock gate, she spots the rutted tyre tracks veering off to the left of the driveway and the grief catches her in the throat. She should visit. That’s what a good daughter, a better one than her, would do. She checks her watch, can’t even make an excuse that she’s got somewhere to be. One of the therapists had told her it would come on tenfold if she didn’t try to process it.

  She wonders if standing at a grave is processing, or just telling yourself you did.

  She leaves the gate as is, gets back in and turns the car off the driveway and heads up the track.

  Dad had already applied for the necessary permits. Of course. He reckoned these things were getting easier anyway with real estate at a premium for both the living and the dead. There were already a couple of generations buried on the hill, though he would be the first to be interred in a biodegradeable shroud and remembered with a laser-cut river rock rather than a granite headstone. She wished he’d told her those plans before he went so she could have told him she approved. It was a good spot, the family plot, on a rise dotted with a couple of old manna gums and a good view out to the east and the pink light of dawn when it came.

  The day itself has been stitched back together in her mind: making tea for her mother at first light, the hard words directed like bullets at Essie when she failed to keep an eye on her four-year-old brother, Ben’s silent admonishment as he put his arms around his daughter, the fact that it was Michael’s name that undid her as she tried to deliver the eulogy, noticing that Steve looked away, did not come to help her.

  It had been hot, breathless when they buried him, but today there is a top wind in the fingers of the eucalypts, rattling and rustling, and she would like to think he is there, telling her something, giving her some sign, but she’s never really believed in such stuff.

  On the afternoon of the burial, she heard Essie talking to Ben quietly, old enough to be aware of the adults around her and their strange sensitivities.

  ‘So, his body’s in the ground, and his soul is in the sky?’

  She remembers thinking how apt the question was. That it was unanswerable, as were so many of the questions her daughter asked.

  Where was your love for me before I was born?

  How come floods always happen to other people?

  Who will die first, out of you and Dad, and when will it be?

  If it weren’t for the anachronistic river rock, you wouldn’t even know he was down there, so efficient has nature been at reclaiming the spot. If she
looks closely enough she can see tiny scurries of insects in the leaf litter. She imagines them burrowing under, through the composting foliage, the topsoil, the clay, to the lacework of the shroud, the hair, the bone. Or perhaps it is quicker than that. She is more familiar with the glacial pace of the breakdown of rock than the quick and dirty decomposition of flesh.

  ‘You’d be a little bit pleased that Ben fucked up, huh, Dad?’ she says. ‘Quietly smug that he was never good enough, that I would’ve done better to stick with the pickings round here.’

  She tilts her head back and breathes in deeply – the grass scent, the warm oil of the trees, the home of it.

  ‘I couldn’t have got through without him though, Dad.’ And perhaps this is what the therapist meant, the great upheaval she feels in her chest, as though her ribs are cleaving apart. ‘After Essie…’ She is almost gasping for breath. ‘If it weren’t for him…’

  Breathe. Breathe. In and out. She slows and waits and visualises the bone and tissue knitting back together.

  ‘I need him, Dad. If nothing else, I need him.’

  She bends and touches the rock with two fingers, before she walks back to the car.

  * * *

  She takes the back road into town. Breathes deeply, realising that the sound she can hear is her own short moans as she exhales, the physical manifestation of this secret she is bearing alone. She cannot shake the feeling of being a child again. Winding down the window, she keeps her eyes on the road but turns her chin, the wind buffeting her hair back.

  The farmhouses are set back, she remembers the bus stopping at the end of each driveway, picking up the straggle of kids. She notices a car behind her, approaching fast. She clearly doesn’t drive at the local speed anymore. The car pulls out and races on in front of her, and she sees the silhouette of a hand go up to thank her.